@NOTOFEMINISM, #FEMINISTSAREUGLY, AND MISANDRY MEMES How Social Media Feminist Humor is Calling out Antifeminism (original) (raw)

In this chapter we consider how social media platforms have produced new spaces for debates over feminism. The undeniable mass uptake of feminism via social media shows us that self-identified feminists are fighting against antifeminism in ways that enable mass participatory audiences via platforms such as Twitter. In particular, we explore how social media feminist humor and irony are used as rhetorical and debating strategies to challenge problematic arguments against or about feminists by re-staging anti-feminist claims as absurd, ridiculous, and illogical. We argue that humorous posts play a central role in increasing feminist audiences and mobilizing feminist connectivity (Papacharissi 2012), collectivity, and solidarity. To demonstrate this, we explore three different manifestations of social media feminist humor that challenge rejections of feminism or antifeminism. First, we look at the hugely popular Twitter account @NoToFeminism, which posts witty rejoinders to antifeminist discourses, and was created specifically to parody the #WomenAgainstFeminism movement (see Cohn, this volume), and has amassed a large following and popularity beyond social media into the mainstream publishing market. Next, we examine the Twitter hashtag #FeministsAreUgly, interrogating how feminists have intervened into the sexist logic that women are feminists because they are sexually undesirable to men. We explore how hashtags can be co-opted in ways that mutate far outside their original aims, given that the hashtag became a space that reinforced Eurocentric, (hetero)normative beauty norms its founders intended it to interrogate. Finally, we explore “misandry” posts which ironically present female superiority in an attempt to parody anti-feminist claims that feminists are man-hating. This tongue in cheek action can be considered a way of mocking willful misunderstandings of feminism. We also consider whether some of the memes celebrate violence against men in gender binary and essentializing ways. Overall we argue that social media affordances offer women opportunities to engage with and defend feminism in novel and exciting ways that complicate claims that our media culture is overwhelmingly postfeminist and that we are living in a moment that marginalizes sustained feminist political dialogue and critique.